The present invention relates to mobile computing devices. In particular, the present invention relates to methods and apparatus for forming distinguished connections between mobile computing devices.
Mobile devices, such as personal information managers (PIMs), tablet PCs, cellular telephones, pagers, watches, and wearable computers typically include one or more buttons, touch screens, or active digitizers through which the mobile device receives explicit instructions from the user. Increasingly, mobile devices are being connected together via a wireless or wired network for purposes of communication, sharing of data and collaborative work.
Humans have evolved to function within a fabric of social connections and collaboration. People work on problems in groups, and indeed the entire field of computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) is devoted to technological support of such groups. Many user tasks and activities revolve around communication, which inherently involves at least two persons. Furthermore, with the burgeoning use of the internet, and research trends in ubiquitous computing and distributed systems, human-computer interaction often involves more than one computer. Yet the prior art offers few examples of real-time interaction techniques that leverage the simultaneous data streams generated by multiple users and multiple computers.
Establishing meaningful connections between devices is a problem of increasing practical concern for ubiquitous computing. Wireless networking and location sensing can allow devices to communicate and may provide information about proximity of other devices. However, with many devices nearby, how a user specifies which devices to connect to remains a problem. Furthermore, connections require semantics: What is the connection for? Is the user collaborating with another user? Is the user combining the input/output resources of multiple devices to provide increased capabilities? Presently, there exists a lack of techniques to intuitively form semantically rich connections between devices.
Few prior art devices are responsive to the manner in which the user is holding the device. As a result, the user is forced to enter explicit instructions into the device to achieve various functions. In light of this, mobile devices are needed that can sense how they are being handled in order to perform certain background functions that expand the functionality of the mobile device without requiring the user to perform any additional actions.
There are also relatively few prior art techniques for forming distinguished connections between multiple devices. One prior art technique is “Smart-Its Friends”, which is described in the paper Holmquist et al., Smart-Its Friends: A Technique for Users to Easily Establish Connections between Smart Artefacts, Ubicomp 2001, Springer-Verlag, 116-122. Smart-Its Friends allows a user to connect a pair of accelerometer-augmented handheld devices by holding the two devices together and shaking them. An identical pattern on the accelerometers suggests a shared context between the devices. The paper suggests using this to form a dedicated connection between the two shaken devices: if a “friend” device enters or leaves proximity, the user's device beeps, thus creating “a sense of awareness” of the comings and goings other users. One problem with Smart-Its Friends is that only this one type of connection can be formed.
Another prior art techniques for forming distinguished connections between multiple devices is “ConnecTables”, which is described in the paper Tandler et al., ConnecTables: dynamic coupling of displays for the flexible creation of shared workspaces, UIST 2001, 11-20. ConnecTables are wheeled tables with mounted LCD displays that can be rolled together so that the top edges of two LCD's meet. The devices then recognize one another through a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag and RFID reader mounted on each device. The displays can only be joined at the top edge (i.e., when they face one another). When joined, two ConnecTables create a shared workspace in which users can pass objects back and forth. With ConnecTables, other types of connections between the two display devices are not supported. Further, since the displays are part of the furniture and cannot be picked up, fluid transitions between shared work and private or semi-private work is not possible.
Much recent discussion has focused on the promise of the wireless internet, yet there has been relatively little work on techniques that help users of mobile devices to collaborate with others and to share information with other persons. For example, when attempting to copy a file between mobile devices, it remains difficult for users to name a device to connect to, specify how to connect, or indicate what information to share.